Ice Fishing - what's not to love..

Wednesday, 11 February 2015

Tomorrow we leave Geilo and on Thursday we leave Norway - which means it's time to see how we are going against our wish list we wrote in Lillehammer..

For anyone who can't read our writing, this is the list, and the status of the items:

• dog sledding - DONE here in Geilo
• pond skating - DONE (if we count a lake as a pond)
• normal skating - DONE (in Drammen where we broke Bjørn's arm, and also in Lillehammer
• ski-ing every day or night - DONE, in fact I've x-country skied every day for nearly two weeks straight 
• get parking ticket - DONE (ok this was added and ticked off after the event to make us feel better about it)
• visit ski-jump - DONE in Lillehammer
• get snowed in or snowed out - NOT DONE - we seem to bring the heat with us - every place we have visited jumps 5 degrees and/or stops snowing. I'm not sorry we haven't been snowed out, as that sounds kind of cold.
• visit Halfjell - NOT DONE - this is a downhill resort near Lillehammer and we were too busy enjoying x-country to bother with alpine - so that's ok
• visit cafe - DONE - in various locations. We didn't get to ski to one which is slightly disappointing - next time
• dig a snow house or snow sculpture - DONE in Lillehammer. 

and last but not least.. 

• Pond/Ice Fishing - which is what we did today.  

I never did Ice Fishing when I lived in Lillehammer, we didn't really know anyone who fished, and I don't love fishing (or fish) so it wasn't on my list of priorities but the kids were very keen to try it while we were here. 

Now our family couldn't be certain of catching a fish in a fish market so we didn't have high hopes of  hauling in a bucket full of them or anything, but we were looking forward to an experience a bit like this: (the photo is taken from the ice-fishing website…)

Note the sunny skies, comfortable looking customer,  haul of fish to the right, kick sled (to while away the hours) and generally relaxed manner - ah ice-fishing, you look so relaxing and pleasant..

In order for you to really get a feel for our actual ice-fishing experience, I'd like you to ask someone nearby to rub your face with coarse sandpaper whilst continuously dumping slushy ice down the back of your trousers,  Yep, it was that fun.  We were picked up at 7.45am by our lovely guide and driven to the lake were we then had to walk ten minutes straight into a howling gale with ice pellets thrashing against us.  Every third step had us up to our thighs in snow, and the picture below is of Jon hanging onto Jett in so he doesn't just blow away like a piece of tumbleweed.

I think it took us a bit more than ten minutes to walk to the most exposed part of the lake,  in fact it felt like an entire polar expedition. Our guide went ahead and by the time we had struggled over he had re-drilled the holes that he had successfully caught fish from recently. So that meant we just had to sit down and relax, enjoying the nature and basking in the serenity.. this is me and Jett, enjoying the nature…(note the snow-drifts piling up behind me)

And this is Zali, really enjoying the nature..

Three of us,  just enjoying the beautiful morning and just wishing it would never end…

The best part of ice fishing was when, after an hour of being blasted by ice pellets and freezing in the wind with the snow piling up on every part of us, was deciding we'd had enough and packing up and going. That's why we look so happy here ..

and here..

The whole experience was so awful that it was actually really funny, even in the middle of it!  So I don't regret doing it, but I sure am glad it's done! Needless to say we didn't catch any fish, but we can at least cross it off our to do list (for all of eternity).

Funnily enough the lake seemed to be by far the most exposed part of this whole region as once we got home again (at around 10am) we were still able to go out and enjoy almost a full day's snowboarding - the tops of some of the lifts were pretty windy but nothing and I mean NOTHING like what we had experienced out on the lake - even when it got so windy they closed one of the lifts. Jon and I also did our 10km ski-skating lap of the lake once the lifts closed and that was totally fine too.  Perhaps we're just cursed with anything to do with fishing.